


So Long As He Remains Man

by Purrs



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, Lovecraftian worldbuilding, minus the bigotry and bullshit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-19 03:58:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16526876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Purrs/pseuds/Purrs
Summary: The Spark isn't the only thing Agatha's locket is suppressing.





	So Long As He Remains Man

She runs through the empty streets, eyes forward, breathing deep but fast. Mist swirls through the town today, blown here from Mechanicsburg. She left her greatcoat at home—she likes to feel the chill on days like this. It’s soothing, and she’ll take as much of that as she can get with her constantly-threatening headaches. Her hair grows damper every minute she spends outside, but she doesn’t mind. What she _does_ mind is that _her locket was stolen_. Her locket, which was supposed to stay on always. Her locket, with the only pictures she has of her parents!

She dwells on it further while she’s trying to fall asleep. And then there’s _Beetle_ , what those Wulfenbachs did to poor Dr. Beetle! Her mind keeps going back to the image of his charred remains and the casual way they were treated. She’ll never see him again, most likely, the Baron will keep him captive. Not to mention the way people _change_ when they’re brought back. Ohh, that Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, how dare he! But her thoughts keep circling back to the locket and the men who took it from her.

She wakes up with a wrench in her hand and eyes that won’t close.

~

It only gets worse once she’s on Castle Wulfenbach. She tugs on her hair and it comes out; she scratches at itchy skin and finds it rough to the touch. She has enough to worry about, she doesn’t _need_ this. There’s her parents, and the Baron, and the Jägergenerals, and so much else.

(The Jägergenerals. She was only barely starting to not flinch away from the younger Jägers, still human-shaped, many of them still with a self-consistent number of limbs. And then tea with the oldest of the lot, formless, with eyes that blink at her and teeth that glint in the light and voices that overlap in speaking the same sentence. When they get into a fight she’s worried one of those countless mouths will swallow her up.)

And the _air_. The too-dry, too-thin atmosphere that rasps in her throat. It was worst in Gil’s flying machine, with nothing shielding her from the sting, with her lungs pulling and pulling and it wasn’t enough and she couldn’t _breathe_. The first chance she got she ran to the hot rain engines (the glorious hot rain engines, how had she ever lived without them) and took desperate comfort in the thick steam.

She stares at herself in the mirror, lips thin and ears flattened against her skull, and she knows she has to get off of this airship.

~

It’s good to be on the ground again. Better still to be in the water. The pond is small, but it’s better than being kilometers off the ground. She doesn’t know what she’ll do next. For now, though, she can swim, and watch as her feet change proportion and her skin turns scaled, and eat from her dwindling supply of sausages.

She thinks about what she knows. She’s a person of the deep, a Mechanicsburger, like her father, though not her mother. (At least, she doesn’t think so. The woman in the locket had none of the signs. She has her mother’s coloring, yes, but her shape is from her father.) People of the deep look like something that might be a construct, but they’re not, they’re older by far (collectively, and in many cases individually) than any technology that might create such a thing. She’s pretty sure _this_ wasn’t normally supposed to happen to her for another fifty or so years at _least_ —but here it is, happening. She experimentally raises and flattens the crest of spines that have grown in, forming a line along her head and neck.

Someone calls her name, and she whips around to face them. Him. It’s Gil. She didn’t expect him to come after her, but here he is. He tells her about Beetle’s notes (she thinks about Beetle imprisoned, Beetle alive, Beetle brought back, about corpse-dust summoned to life and how a few words to the right gods can kill the resurrected as easily as bring them back) and the revelations within.

She’s a Heterodyne?

She’s a Heterodyne. Well. That’s something.

She’s...the last Heterodyne, actually, unless there are any more secret ones. She’s had no children (certainly hadn’t wanted any, not yet) and from everything she’s heard people of the deep can’t reproduce after the change. And she’s well into the change. Oh well. Mechanicsburg will have to find a new family to lead them on land, she supposes.

Gil wants to bring her back to Castle Wulfenbach to talk to the Baron, but she declines. And continues to decline, refusing all of his arguments. She won’t go up in the air again. He suggests that the Baron could come down to her, and she accepts.

A day or so after he leaves to report back, though, a circus passes by, and she realizes she can get to Mechanicsburg with them, and she persuades them to let her join up with them temporarily. Her thoughts fill with swimming through the Dyne-tunnel to the sea, with visions of the submerged cities that are her heritage.

Meeting with the Baron forgotten, she sets off to go home.

~

In the circus, she meets a young woman with green hair, a young woman who introduces herself as Zeetha daughter of Chump, Zeetha of Skifander. Skifander—she knows that. She greets Zeetha, a Person of the Deep to a Person of the Earth, and Zeetha is all over her with questions. Unfortunately, she does not know _where_ Skifander is. Aside from ‘under the earth’, of course, but that was a given. Still, she has found a friend. And a mentor.

Zeetha’s techniques don’t always translate to her new form, but the Skifandran makes sure she learns to defend herself. The teeth and venomous spines give her an advantage on that, at least. She spends most of the time feeling uncomfortably dry, though it isn’t as bad as it was on the Castle. She thinks longingly of the little pond. It was freshwater, sure, but it was still something. But no. It wouldn’t have been enough, not really.

She mentions her discomfort one day to Zeetha, who thinks for a minute and then motions her to come. Zeetha takes her to a nearby clearing and, slowly, slowly, _makes_ the dirt of the clearing become water. In the end, there’s a small pool maybe six feet across and five deep. She gapes, thanks Zeetha profusely, and slides on in—she was tempted to jump, but that would waste the water her friend spent so much effort on. It’s cool and wet and she’s so, so grateful.

Zeetha confides in her then, about the way of speaking that the People of the Earth have, about the silence Zeetha’s known since leaving. She tells Zeetha to go ahead, and Zeetha speaks within her head, and she smiles her sharp-toothed grin and props her web-handed forearms on the edge of the pool.

They are both foreigners, here. Never mind that she grew up in Europa; this isn’t her home anymore.

They can be foreigners together.


End file.
